It’s not often that you get to meet the mind behind a meme, but today, we’re getting to know the mind behind too many to count. These things don’t just grow by themselves, you know. We may think that we’re funny from time to time, but compared to this account? They’ve beaten us at our own game far too many times to let them evade the Community Focus spotlight.

Enter: DestinyTheMeme.

Ah, DestinyTheMeme. We meet at last. Who are you? No seriously… Tell us about yourself, outside of the memes!

DTM: As the email address that I used to respond to you suggests, my name is Moira, I’m an undergrad at NYU Tisch Film & TV. Outside of memes I work on animation and screenwriting; go to the cafeteria with my classmates; participate in Smash tournaments, although I have no idea what to do (I tried to pop a super as Kirby); spend quality time with my dog, as well as work on art and write my (soon to be) novel. Some fun facts: I speak three-and-a-half languages and like to collect little things.

What got you into Destiny? And to take it a step further, how did you get to your Legendary Meme status?

DTM: Baguette. I’m a dog person (although my neighbor’s cat loves me).

Drifter Pog,

Moira

Wait, what? Drifter… pog? Ok. That’s a new one.

Many thanks to Moria for spending some time with us this week. Do you have any suggestions for future Community Focus articles? Feel free to let me or Cozmo know! We’re are always eager to get to know the stories behind this amazing community.

The Gamasutra Job Board is the most diverse, active and established board of its kind for the video game industry!

Here is just one of the many, many positions being advertised right now.

Location: Burbank, California

Character TDs at Insomniac are responsible for working with the talented team to design, implement and maintain the animation and rigging pipeline.  This role creates character setups, Python tools and basic animations as needed, and works with other departments to solve art related production needs, creates production systems and methods to attain production goals. Go teamwork!  Read on if this sounds interesting-

Essential Duties and Responsibilities include the following:

• Creates high quality animation rigs, systems, setups and workflows that help to define the standard for the industry
• Designs, develops and continuously improves character set-up process and systems, including facial setups and animation transfer tools, as it relates to the animation pipeline
• Rigs characters in preparation for animation in Maya. This includes creating skeletons, smooth-binding character models, rigging character faces for lip-synch and facial performances, writing Python tools, and creating custom rigs as needed
• Writes Python scripts that expedite character setup and animation processes
• Works with the Core Dept on improving engine and tools features to advance the state of character performances
• Works with the Art Department on modeling practices to facilitate the set-up process and to advance the visual fidelity of the character performances
• Acts as an intermediary between the animation and programming teams to elucidate the workflows, needs, and terminologies of each team
• Understands (and assist when technical needs arise) the entire process of creating cinematics including set construction, camera setup, character blocking, character animation, animation troubleshooting, and help ensure that scenes run properly on the real-time game engine
• Maintains an expert understanding of skeletons, facial animation methodologies, constraints and other Maya tools and systems used for character animation
• Maintains expert understanding of the Facial Action Coding System and corresponding facial anatomy
• Possesses strong shape-sculpting abilities for both facial rigging and corrective shapes
• Maintains strong understanding of skeletal and muscular anatomy
• Maintains awareness of industry leading performance capture and solving techniques, including machine-learning based approaches
• Assists Leads with supervising/mentoring with more junior level Character TD’s
• Other duties may be assigned

Education/Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) from a four-year college or university; or five to seven years related experience and/or training; or equivalent combination of education and experience
• One to four years of experience in character setup, Python scripting, a familiarity with MEL and a comprehensive understanding of all technical aspects of Maya animation
• One to two years of animation training covering all basic animation principals
• Extensive knowledge of Maya

Other Skills: The ability to articulate thoughts and ideas effectively both verbally and in writing.

If this sound like the opportunity that you have been looking for- we want to hear from you.  Please use the link and apply directly to the role.  Also remember to attach your reel.  Thanks!

Interested? Apply now.

Whether you’re just starting out, looking for something new, or just seeing what’s out there, the Gamasutra Job Board is the place where game developers move ahead in their careers.

Gamasutra’s Job Board is the most diverse, most active, and most established board of its kind in the video game industry, serving companies of all sizes, from indie to triple-A.

Looking for a new job? Get started here. Are you a recruiter looking for talent? Post jobs here.

The Gamasutra Deep Dives are an ongoing series with the goal of shedding light on specific design, art, or technical features within a video game, in order to show how seemingly simple, fundamental design decisions aren’t really that simple at all.

In this deep dive, Wilmot’s Warehouse designer and artist Richard Hogg, who was also one of the lead creatives on the delightfully abstract puzzler Hohokum, serves up a meandering and delightfully insightful look at how the emergent puzzler came to be. 

If you like what you see, you can check out earlier entries in our Deep Dive series, including creating comfortable UI for VR strategy game Skyworld, achieving seamless branching in Watch Dogs 2’s Invasion of Privacy missions, imbuing cryptic worlds with color in Dead Cells, and developing a unique jump-only movement mechanic in Dandara.

At its heart Wilmot’s Warehouse is a game about categorizing things. This is the main thing that people do in the game and the main thing that people seem to want to talk about. That’s great. I am not going to talk about it much here though. I am uniquely unqualified to do so as I am the person who made all this stuff. It seems to me that people who are unfamiliar with it all are much better at talking about the challenges and joys of organizing all the things in this game, an excellent example being this Holly Gramazio article where she manages to compare playing Wilmot with her Brexit Prepping.

I am a game designer but my practical skillset is very small. I can draw. That’s about it. I can’t code, I can’t make 3D art assets and I don’t really understand tools like Unity or Unreal. I make up for these inadequacies by working with other people who can do these things. Most notably my indefatigable colleague of over 10 years Ricky Haggett.

Unfortunately, a few years ago Ricky went off and made a game that I wasn’t involved with. It’s called Loot Rascals and is very good. This left me in a bit of a pickle. Mostly during that spell I did illustration work for money but I also felt the need to design a game. So I started designing one, just by drawing it. This is the beginning of the process that eventually became Wilmot’s Warehouse.

I didn’t have any strong vision for what kind of a game it might be. In fact I deliberately avoided that kind of thinking and instead focused on a more practical and achievable goal of just making a bunch of visual elements that would hopefully make some kind of an interesting game.

I proceeded to draw hundreds of square tiles representing different things. While doing this I started playing with ideas about how these things could be similar and different to each other. Thematically, visually, color-wise etc. A mini ecosystem of interconnected visual elements began to evolve. Some in clear groups, linked by color or some kind of obvious motif,  some in thematic categories of varying obviousness, and some oblique, esoteric connections that probably only make sense to me. Most things are in more than one category and some things are deliberately in no category at all. Inconsistencies and contradictions were embraced and nurtured.

Hopefully you can see how, without writing a line of code or going anywhere near a game engine I had a set of powerful tools for shaping and tuning a game. I could think about and adjust the difficulty and the ‘gamefeel’ by editing this growing set of images. This is at a point where I still didn’t even know what the game was going to be like!

Despite not knowing what the game was going to be it turns out that the categorizing aspect of Wilmot’s Warehouse that I earlier said was the main thing that people do in the game was pretty much designed at this point. Another point about this process is that it was fun. Making these things was a bit like playing a game in a funny kind of way.  I would like to think that most good games were also quite playful to make.

I then started thinking about who to collaborate with. I made a document that I could send to possible collaborators explaining what this stuff was and inviting them to get involved with making a game out of it. I deliberately didn’t talk too much about what that game might be because I wanted to leave space for someone else’s ideas. A proper collaboration. I did mention a few possible game ideas in the doc. ‘A better match-3 game’ was top of the list and my favorite at the time. Then there was a bunch of other ideas (both video game and card/boardgame) that I am not going to share here and finally the last idea on the list was this:

A weird kind of inventory management game (this is possibly the ‘warehouse’ game that I have been wanting to make for years. It’s kind of complicated but I can explain it upon request. Ricky and Nate are sick of hearing about it. 

(The Nate here is Nathan Gary who we worked with on Hohokum)

I sent it to Ricky to see what he thought about it…

Time passed. For some reason I never sent the doc to all those cool game designer that I was planning to and then one day, out of the blue Ricky made a prototype of the warehouse game. In Ricky’s words:

“I went away on holiday for Christmas, and took my laptop… and I had this idea that maybe I could make a little prototype of this warehouse idea using these coloured tiles, and surprise Dick with it.”

The two points I want to focus on here are about Ricky’s initial attitude about this warehouse idea and about the fact that he made this prototype ‘to surprise me’

Earlier I said that Ricky and Nate were sick of hearing about this idea. That was an understatement. In reality they openly mocked it. They had a running joke that I should call it ‘Clown Warehouse’ and make all the things in it clown paraphernalia. I wasn’t particularly hurt by this. It was good banter. It’s kind of how we talk about game ideas a lot of the time.

But then Ricky made a prototype to surprise me. (Not to mention spending months taking it from a prototype to a finished game.) And my point is that this is how friendships work. These expressions of good natured antagonism and affection, Winding someone up one day and giving them a nice surprise another, are the hallmarks of real friendship.

If you make games and your game development process isn’t like this you are doing it wrong. In my opinion.

I play a lot of Tetris. In fact I never stop playing Tetris and play it pretty much every day.

Wilmot’s Warehouse isn’t actually that much like Tetris but one way that it is, that I find interesting, is that it incorporates what I call emergent puzzles. There is probably a better word for this. What I mean by it is that the puzzles in the game are a function of the player’s behavior. Rather than solving puzzles that have been ‘authored’ by a game designer you are solving puzzles that are a byproduct of how you solved the last puzzle. Or at least a byproduct of your overall behavior and the choices that you have made leading up to this point. It is what I love about Tetris and I am proud that Wilmot’s Warehouse is a bit like that too.

Firstly because from a design point of view it has an elegance to it. Rather than having to design puzzles we have to design systems that lead to spontaneously emerging puzzles. This is a good thing because I am no Alan Hazleden. I am not clever enough to think of good puzzles, let alone work out a nice progression from easy puzzles to really hard ones. Turns out I don’t need to. I just need to make a system that allows the player to make and solve their own puzzles.

Secondly, as a player I like the element of balance in these kinds of games. I like how, in order to ‘be good’ at the game just solving a problem isn’t enough. You have to solve it with economy and prudence in order for the next problem to hopefully be easier. There is an element of overall ‘management’ here, maintaining an equilibrium. I like this kind of gameplay. It is very satisfying when it goes well but also fun and exciting when it all goes to shit.

Thirdly, because it is like life. Real life works in exactly this same way. Life throws challenges at you and you have to deal with them but how well you deal with them often affects the nature of subsequent challenges. This is true of doing your accounts, your weekly shop in the supermarket or snowboarding down a mountain.

Realism is a guiding principle in the games me and Ricky make. A good example is our game Hohokum. It is considered to be quite a strange game and you might not think that ideas bout realism had much to do with its making. In fact there is one key way in which it is more realistic than most other games. This is to do with how Hohokum operates as a place. When you play Hohokum you can go anywhere at any time. You can visit any area of the game and spend as long as you want there. In this respect it is like a real place. When you go for a nice city break in Glasgow you don’t have to accomplish a set series of tasks in the Merchant Quarter before the West End unlocks for you. Yet most video games work like this. Even many that purport to be ‘open world’ games.

Wilmot’s Warehouse is a realist game in a different way. Simply that it is based on my real life experiences of working in these kinds of jobs. I worked in two warehouses, Asda and Boots, and also spent a year working in a picture archive at the BFI. The initial idea for this game comes from how much I enjoyed these jobs. They were rewarding, interesting, fulfilling jobs for various reasons but the main one to focus on here is how game-like they were. A big part of my enjoyment in all three of these jobs came from trying to be good at them. Optimizing my routine. Becoming an expert on the informational-topology of the space. Even altering and improving that topology when the opportunity arises. I kind of self-gamified these jobs for myself.

During development we constantly used this principle of realism as our compass when making design decisions. “What would happen in a real warehouse” It is really gratifying when you realize how often the solution to a design problem in the game turned out to be the thing closest to how warehouses work in real life. Realism in this case is not just an inspiration but a tool.

We need to talk about Amazon

This is from a YouTuber. It is a familiar refrain and one that troubles me a lot. Large logistic hubs like Amazon are a terrible thing. This is something I care about a lot and have spoken about before. Without spoiling it for people who haven’t played it, this is also a thing that the game tackles, albeit in a gentle humorous way.

It saddens me when people see that there is a game about working in a warehouse and instantly jump to the conclusion that it is some kind of Amazon Simulator. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth. Companies like Amazon have systematically used technology to strip logistics workers of any agency. These jobs dehumanize and abuse the people who do them. No one would want to play a game that is like working for Amazon.

I like this tweet. It contains an important distinction:

Fortunately even in 2019 there are still many jobs in logistics that are not working for Amazon and that are capable of still being enjoyable in the way that Wilmot’s Warehouse hopefully is. During playtesting a build found its way into a vinyl record distribution warehouse in London and it was lovely to hear about people whose real life jobs involve sorting, stacking and dispatching products playing Wilmot and relating to it.

I Live in Hastings, East Sussex and often find myself daydreaming about what kind of nice local warehouse job I can do when this video game business dries up. Current top of my list is Source BMX.

A popular Twitter account called ‘wholesome games’ gave Wilmot’s Warehouse the thumbs up and that makes me happy. I like the idea of wholesome games. Me and Ricky have always tried to make games that are useful and welcome parts of people’s lives. All our games are non violent, and we generally focus on experiences that are not stressful and possibly even therapeutic in nature. Wilmot’s Warehouse presents some problems in this respect.

A common reaction to it is that people find it very therapeutic but in a way that inherently includes an element of stressfulness. I guess this is just the nature of a ‘sorting things’ game. It can be incredibly relaxing and rewarding but in a way that easily tips over into something that feels overwhelming or daunting. I don’t think there is a complete solution to this. We have done the best we can to build in systems that help people feel relaxed and content while playing the game. The fail states are very ‘soft’, almost meaningless fail states and the game is very generous in terms of giving the player all the time and space that they might need.

A similar, and perhaps more troubling issue is addictiveness. When I meet people who aren’t interested in games they often tell me that they don’t play video games because ‘they are addictive’. Until recently I have been able to reassure them that I don’t make addictive games. Now I have made Wilmot’s Warehouse and am not so sure.

The thing that baffles me is all the people who are saying that Wilmot is addictive are all saying it in a complementary way. “My life is going to shit because I can’t stop playing Wilmot’s, lol”. I take comfort from the fact that there is mostly a cheerful tongue-in-cheek nature to these admissions of personal weakness.

I want to make games that respect people’s time. That don’t take the piss. That don’t trap people in unhealthy fun/not-fun gameplay loops. Games that are compelling but that don’t overstay their welcome. I know what it’s like to feel resentful towards a game that you can’t stop playing. (Here’s looking at you Alexey Pajitnov) I never want to make games like that.

Hopefully Wilmot is on the right side of the line between that nice compelling feeling you get from a good video game and unhealthy feelings of addiction. We have done our best to make it that way. Wilmot’s Warehouse takes about 6 hours to complete. It has a finite end and limited replayability. I think your average person who is really into Wilmot might play it through twice. Perhaps one normal game and then a game on hard or with a friend. We have made very deliberate design decisions to that effect. There has been lots of calls for an ‘endless mode’ and that will never happen. To quote Ricky:

It would absolutely have been possible to keep the warehouse in equilibrium, so you can keep going forever, or to gradually make it harder and harder at the end until you just can’t continue any more…

None of those felt like satisfactory ends to the game though. We didn’t want everyone’s experience of the game to be ‘I played it until I got bored/frustrated, and then stopped’. Also, keeping players on the hamster wheel doesn’t feel ethical.  Time is precious, and as game designers, we don’t want to waste it. Building in meaningful, satisfactory off ramps feels like a thing more games should be doing.

I think I spent somewhere in the region of 200-400 hours playtesting this game.

Nate Crowley, in his RPS review, said:

“It feels very much like a game where every feature has been through hundreds of iterations in order to end up fitting just so with everything else; if not, the developers are sorcerers and I fear them.”

Yeah. We are not sorcerers. We just spent a lot of time on this stuff. At times I felt like I was going mad. Playtesting your own game is an awkward and cringeworthy thing to do. It’s not much fun. Then after a long period of torment you kind of break through into some new higher state of not-giving-a-fuck and it is like a weird kind of enlightenment. Like it’s not your game anymore. It’s liberating. I cycled through feelings like this and then back in to doubt and self-consciousness quite a few times. It’s also boring a lot of the time. I fell asleep while playing Wilmot’s Warehouse …quite a few times.

I’m not sure I am recommending this to anyone. After all, not all games even benefit from this kind of playtesting. Many games are somewhat spoiled by prior knowledge that, which as a designer you’re bound to have. That means the effectiveness of spoilers, surprises and twists can’t ever really be gauged by the person that made them in the first place, which is probably a touch obvious.

But if your game is the kind of game that you can repeatedly playtest meaningfully yourself, say a rogue-like, then it’s a good idea to do a lot of it. I’m not saying this in a bullshit macho ‘you have to put the hours in.’ kind of a way. We don’t crunch. We work sensible hours. It’s more that I think you should expect to make playtesting time a big chunk of your overall development time. See playing your own game as a big part of the work that you do as a game designer. As valuable as coding or making the art or whatever. And do it in a healthy way.

Ultimately, with this kind of game it is worth it. Wilmot’s Warehouse is undoubtedly a good game rather than an ok game because of all the playtesting I did. Anyone who has also played the original version that we released as part of Humble Bundle probably has a sense of what I mean.

With people doing video conferencing all day, good audio has recently become much more important. The best option is obviously a proper audio studio. Unfortunately, this is not something you will always have and you might need to make do with a much simpler setup.

In such situations, a noise reduction filter that keeps your voice but filters out ambient noises (street noise, keyboard, …) can be very helpful. In this article, we will take a look at how to integrate such a filter into PulseAudio so that it can easily be used in all applications with no additional requirements on their part.

The Idea

We set up PulseAudio for live noise-reduction using an LADSPA filter.

This creates a new PulseAudio source which can be used as a virtual microphone. Other applications will not even realize that they are not dealing with physical devices and you can select it as if you had an additional microphone connected.

Terminology

Before we start, it is good to know the following two PulseAudio terms to better understand what we are doing:

• source – represents a source from which audio can be obtained. Like a microphone
• sink – represents a consumer of audio like a speaker

Each PulseAudio sink also has a source called monitor which can be used to get the audio put into that sink. For example, you could have audio put out by your headphones while using the monitor of your headphone device to record the output.

Installation

While PulseAudio is usually pre-installed, we need to get the LADSPA filter for noise reduction. You can build and install the filter manually, but it is much easier to install the filter via Fedora Copr:

sudo dnf copr enable -y lkiesow/noise-suppression-for-voice

sudo dnf install -y ladspa-realtime-noise-suppression-plugin

Note that the Copr projects are not maintained and quality-controlled by Fedora directly.

Enable Noise Reduction Filter

First, you need to identify the name of the device you want to apply the noise reduction to. In this example, we’ll use the RODE NT-USB microphone as input.

$ pactl list sources short

0 alsa_input.usb-RODE_Microphones_RODE_NT-USB-00.iec958-stereo …

1 alsa_output.usb-0c76_USB_Headphone_Set-00.analog-stereo.monitor …

Next, we create a new PulseAudio sink, the filter and a loopback between microphone and filter. That way, the output from the microphone is used as input for the noise reduction filter. The output from this filter will then be available via the null sink monitor.

To visualize this, here is the path the audio will travel from the microphone to, for example, a browser:

mic → loopback → ladspa filter → null sink [monitor] → browser

While this sounds complicated, it is set up with just a few simple commands:

pacmd load-module module-null-sink \ sink_name=mic_denoised_out

pacmd load-module module-ladspa-sink \ sink_name=mic_raw_in \ sink_master=mic_denoised_out \ label=noise_suppressor_stereo \ plugin=librnnoise_ladspa \ control=50

pacmd load-module module-loopback \ source=alsa_input.usb-RODE_Microphones_RODE_NT-USB-00.iec958-stereo \ sink=mic_raw_in \ channels=2

That’s it. You should now be able to select the new device.

Chromium

Unfortunately, browsers based on Chromium will hide monitor devices by default. This means, that we cannot select the newly created noise-reduction device in the browser. One workaround is to select another device first, then use pavucontrol to assign the noise-reduction device afterward.

But if you do this on a regular basis, you can work around the issue by using the remap-source module to convert the null sink monitor to a regular PulseAudio source. The module is actually meant for remapping audio channels – e.g. swapping left and right channel on stereo audio – but we can just ignore these additional capabilities and create a new source similar to the monitor:

pacmd load-module module-remap-source \ source_name=denoised \ master=mic_denoised_out.monitor \ channels=2

The remapped device delivers audio identical to the original one so that assigning this with PulseAudio will yield no difference. But this device does now show up in Chromium:

Improvements

While the guide above should help you with all the basics and will get you a working setup, there are a few things you can improve.

But while the commands above should generally work, you might need to experiment with the following suggestions.

Latency

By default, the loopback module will introduce a slight audio latency. You can hear this by running an echo test:

gst-launch-1.0 pulsesrc ! pulsesink

You might be able to reduce this latency by using the latency_msec option when loading the loopback module:

pacmd load-module module-loopback \ latency_msec=1 \ source=alsa_input.usb-RODE_Microphones_RODE_NT- USB-00.iec958-stereo \ sink=mic_raw_in \ channels=2

Voice Threshold

The noise reduction library provides controls for a voice threshold. The filter will return silence if the probability for sound being voice is lower than this threshold. In other words, the higher you set this value, the more aggressive the filter becomes.

You can pass different thresholds to the filter by supplying them as control argument when the ladspa-sink module is being loaded.

pacmd load-module module-ladspa-sink \ sink_name=mic_raw_in \ sink_master=mic_denoised_out \ label=noise_suppressor_stereo \ plugin=librnnoise_ladspa \ control=95

Mono vs Stereo

The example above will work with stereo audio. When working with a simple microphone, you may want to use a mono signal instead.

For switching to mono, use the following values instead when loading the different modules:

• label=noise_suppressor_mono – when loading the ladspa-sink module
• channels=1 – when loading the loopback and remap-source modules

Persistence

Using the pacmd command for the setup, settings are not persistent and will disappear if PulseAudio is restarted. You can add these commands to your PulseAudio configuration file if you want them to be persistent. For that, edit ~/.config/pulse/default.pa and add your commands like this:

.include /etc/pulse/default.pa load-module module-null-sink sink_name=mic_denoised_out

load-module module-ladspa-sink …

…

Limitations

If you listen to the example above, you will notice that the filter reliably reduces background noise. But unfortunately, depending on the situation, it can also cause a loss in voice quality.

The following example shows the results with some street noise. Activating the filter reliably removes the noise, but in this example, the voice quality noticeably drops as well:

As a conclusion, we can say that this can help if you find yourself in less than ideal audio scenarios. It is also very effective if you are not the main speaker in a video conference and you do not want to constantly mute yourself.

Still, good audio equipment and a quiet environment will always be better.

Have fun.